Ashbash's Poker Blog

Life-skills in Poker

2005-06-14T12:10:00.000+01:00

Why is that when I'm on a bad run, I still get so stressed? I still think its rigged against me. You know the feeling. By now I should be able to patiently ride out any downswings.

I mean its not like I'm stupid. Or young anymore (unfortunately). So why do I seem to find it so difficult to learn this basic life-skill.

I am getting better, but its a surprisingly slow process.

Update on progress. May finished well - taking my winnings for the month over $1k. This was probably my biggest ever month for pure playing profit, because I had very little rake rebate and bonus.

June has started well, but my expectations have unfortunately started to rise as well. I've made around $300 so far, but we're almost half way through the month so I'm behind where I want to be. My biggest problem has been slow starts to my sessions. Once I get ahead on the $25 NL tables I seem to be able to boss the game - its getting the initial momentum that I seem to find difficult. And all my recent sessions have started with bad beats - lots of them!

Anyway - staying positive! I'm winning. I'm winning at an incredible rate relative to the stakes I'm playing. And I've just come of a run of bad beats which I'm sure is about to change.

I have a couple of dabbles at $50 tables. First time out I had a cold run of cards and 2 horrible bad beats. Second time I did ok. I'm up, but only a few bets. Need to spend more time there I think!

Do I need to be more arrogant??!!

2005-05-20T14:27:00.000+01:00

May is going pretty well. A couple of blips, but I'm almost up to last months total of $750 profit, playing $25 and $50 NL ring games.

In terms of BB's I'm really tearing up the game, especially when you add in bonuses. I don't have the sudden rushes that some players have, because I don't play that way and I'm certainly far from pushing every edge at the moment. You just don't need to when people are making so many mistakes all around you.

But am I doing myself out of much bigger profits by not moving up a couple of limits? I've got plenty of bankroll. That got me to thinking about how important confidence/arrogance is in a poker player.

Obviously in a bad player this is a disaster. And to be quite honest it is a situation you see all day every day. People who think they can play but can't really. But in an above average player I think perhaps a bit of arrogance is an asset. And when you look at the top players (in most fields not just poker) they all have that self-belief that borders on arrogance. Cause or effect - I suspect its the former.

Next month I might give it a go up a couple of levels and see how I go. Maybe the real ATM's won't be around and I'll find I make fewer BB's/hr but the same money, or even that I am out of my depth.

Somehow I think I could easily go to the $100 at Party/Empire and still find myself in the top 10% of players playing there. I'll keep you posted.

Low Stakes NLHE - A Game of Mistakes not Maths

2005-05-10T12:28:00.000+01:00

My impression of Limit poker has been that it is primarily a game of starting hand strategy and maths. Online, the ability to read opponents is important, but definitely secondary to your own strategic decisions. I believe you can make money at this game simply by playing your cards and the board, and making no attempt to work out what others might have.

Returning to NL as more experienced player than when I last played it, I believe that it is a game of mistakes not maths. Most of my sessions are being dominated by a small number of "mistakes". These are influencing my results more than the bad beats which plagued me in limit. Yes I have bad beats but there are far far fewer.

What I mean by a misake, is a large bet or call where I am behind and don't have decent odds to improve. For example, calling with a set when there is a possible rag wheel straight on the board. I tell myself, they can't have played 74 to a raise, when actually I know they can and I'm just being stubborn with the set I've waited 2 hours for. I'm sure you can all come up with your own examples.

The bottom line is that most players don't regularly bluff with big bets. There are a few, but not many. Nine times out of 10, if someone comes over the top of your raise with a huge bet, then they have you beat, unless you have the nuts.

I've been really working at minimising the mistakes I've made and my results have shot through the roof in terms of BB/hour. Yes I am being bluffed more. Yes I am folding more winning hands. But in straight forward cash terms, I'm winning more.

At higher levels of NLHE I'm sure such a "weak" approach would be torn apart. But at the low stakes tables people aren't that observant and where they are, most don't know how to deal with it anyway. I quite like people thinking a large raise will push me off a pot - I can slow play and get a nice pay-off.

Best of luck to all (unless you're at my table!)

End of April Update

2005-05-05T11:47:00.000+01:00

The short version would be - not a lot has changed since my last entry.

After the last post mid month, I was on holiday for 10 days so I only played a couple more sessions before the end of April.

I finished the month up $750. Admittedly a big chunk of that profit was bonus and rake rebate but I'm really pleased with it for a couple of reasons. Firstly it was my first month back at NL for almost a year and a half, so I was pleased to make a profit at all. And secondly, the figures were depressed by a big loss playing limit at the beginning of the month.

I've been playing the lowest NL tables available at most of the sites I play on, just to get back into the swing of things. The regular winning sessions have restored my confidence a little and I can feel my aggression factor started to rise back to an acceptable level. I still play a fairly passive game, but I think that will always be the case, its just a question of mixing it up from time to time.

One thing about low stakes NL is that its bad for clearing bonuses and generating rake rebate. Any profit I make in May will be mainly through play!! But thats a good thing. So far I'm up around $100 and I haven't had too much time to play. Setting my targets at trying to get up to $1k for the month - fingers crossed.

Good luck playing!

Had To Switch

2005-04-14T18:59:00.000+01:00

So after around 15 months since I started playing limit, the game finally got to me over the past 8 weeks or so.

I just hit a brick wall. I played tight. I played aggressive. I played every which way I could to try and break things but the poker gods still had it in for me. I wasn't just losing, I was losing big. Bonus and rebates stemmed the haemorrages, but my blood pressure was taking a beating even if my bankroll was just about holding its own.

I got to the point when something had to give. So I went and played some NL on the lowest tables available. Guess what - I won! So I played some more. And I still won.

In a moment of madness, I went back to limit to try and clear some bonus at Absolute, and Noble. I got caned. Unbelieveable bad beats followed by artic runs of cards.

Despite bashing my head against a wall for the best part of two months, I'm still stubborn enough to believe I'm not stupid. No, I learn from my mistakes...eventually. This time I bailed out of limit and straight back to NL.

So far in April I'm up between $600 and $700. There's alot of bonus and rake rebate in there, so it kind of looks like I've only made a couple of hundred bucks playing NL, but actually I lost so much in my limit games that I've made around $600 playing profit on NL. Bearing in mind thats mainly at Empire $25 buy ins, or at most 50c/$1 tables elsewhere, thats a pretty good return. I've not had so much time to play this month, so my win rate in BB per hour is monstrous. :-)

All in all, its a nice game when you are winning. When you are losing it can be downright miserable. Next time I hit a cold streak at a game or a level (which I'm sure I will), I hope I won't take so long to change things. This is not a game you can play when you think you are "owed" cards, or that the world is against you!!!

Cruel March

2005-03-24T14:27:00.000Z

March didn't get off to the best start. I lost around $750 in my first two sessions. Since then it has been a long grind trying to get back.

The cards have been really cold for me and I've struggled to post a single decent winning session. I've won a few bucks here and there, but most of the recovery has been bonus based rather than playing profit.

Its amazing how a lack of confidence can affect you game. All of a sudden leaks creep in, one at a time, and then you find yourself dropping out of pots that you have perfectly good odds for, because you don't want to take another loss to your stack when you miss. I've spent the last 2 weeks really analysing my play and closing off a number of leaks, but there was nothing there that would justify the extent of my difficulties this month. At $5/$10 maybe, but not at $1/$2 and $2/$4.

I did have one amusing experience. After being sucked out on 3 times in 5 hands I typed some comment in the chat box. It was a general comment, not aimed at any one player. Anyway, some bright spark replied that I was losing because I was playing too many hands! You have to laugh. Anyone who knows me, will know how stupid that comment was. If I went to three rivers and lost, you know I had trips or better on each occasion. But at the moment those hands just aren't good enough.

The high point of the month was definitely winning the inter-forum challenge between www.poker-strategy.org and www.wannatalkpoker.com . It restored a little faith that I am actually quite good at this game and recent events are more to do with poor cards than poor play.

So, with a week to go of the month, I've now moved slightly into the black and I'm hoping that I'm due a few cards. I'm not going to make my $1k target this month, but even a couple of hundred would feel like a major achievement.

Good luck to all. And if by any chance Longline reads this - congrats on the bad beat bonus!

End of Month Blues

2005-03-02T11:38:00.000Z

Well on the plus side, I made over $1500 profit in February. On the downside that means I made virtually nothing for the last 3 weeks of the month!

The cruellest blow was a Siberian run of cards at Empire which cost me $470 in a week. And unfortunately there hasn't really been much of an upswing since - minor gains, plus bonuses got me the lost money back, but there hasn't been much of a thrill in that. Its not the same as a good winning session.

Anyway, for all you conspiracy theorists out there, I am collecting some data on the success rate of people going all in during limit ring games. For a while now I have joked about how you can't beat an all in player and the stats are bearing this out. So far the all in player has won over 70% of the time, even though the favourite to underdog ratio is near enough 50:50. This figure doesn't sound that amazing, except when you factor in that not all hands are heads up. The all in player is winning 70% of the time, even though often they will have to beat 2 or 3 players. Thats way way more than their fair share.

If ever there was an argument to support online poker sites not being completely random, its this. Anyone who believes that sites don't have an interest in keeping an all-in player at the table is clearly in denial. I don't believe online poker is rigged in favour of specific individuals, but I do suspect that the sites are skewed to keep people playing. Unfortunately all my data is manual so it won't convince the schills.

So, back to the grind. Hopefully that big winning session is just around the corner

Mid Month Malaise

2005-02-18T13:54:00.000Z

You know that feeling when you just want to pick up the screen and hurl it across the room. Or like in the movies, pull out a scary big gun and offload into the screen, leaving it a sparking smoking wreck.

That was kind of where I was yesterday. Beat after beat. I lost with 12 consecutive flopped sets, and one miracle one-outer when my aces over queens lost to four queens on the river. If I won a pot it had like 3 bets in it. The rest of the time I spent my money building massive pots whilst ahead, only to see someone else take it down on the river.

Eventually, after hours of frustration, the downswing ended abruptly and I finally moved into profit for the first time in a few days. I'm a little under $200 away from last months haul, so I'm hoping to reach and overtake that. I also want to see what effect yesterdays marathon session had on my rake rebate stats at poker-strategy.org - its nice to know that I'll be well up at the start of March when we're only half way through Feb!

Just got Poker Tracker. I'm only marginally interested at this stage in what it can tell me about other players. What I'm looking forward to is seeing my own game in more detail. After 1000 hands its got me as a semi-loose aggressive/aggressive player. Pleased about the aggressive part, but obviously need to look at the semi-loose part. Generally I feel I play pretty tight. The hand histories did all come from a long losing session, and I haven't loaded in any of the upswing yet, but still it is always interesting to get an objective opinion on my game.

I'm only going to start spending time on my opponents once I'm happy with my game. I suspect you need alot of hands before the software gives you a decent read because the highest ranked player so far is someone I know is break even at best.

Onwards and upwards. Barring a miracle, February isn't going to be my first $2k month, but that possibility looks more and more like a probability as each month passes.

Variance

2005-02-10T13:49:00.000Z

I hate it!!

I didn't have to wait until the 20th of the month to hit my brick wall. Over the past 3 days since my last post I've managed to take my tally for the month over $1k, but boy what a rollercoaster.

I started off by dropping over $400 in less than 2 hours on Absolute. Kept getting good cards, kept losing. After winning 1% of hands during the period, the words "brick" "head" "wall" "banging" and "against" circled in my mind, so I went back to Paradise to clear the rest of my bonus there.

It didn't start well and I was down $100 there in no time. Eventually I clawed it round and managed a winning session. Next day I went back to Paradise. Thanks to some good cards and some really juicy games (Paradise does seem to have a wide contrast in tight vs wild games) I cleared the bonus for a healthy profit and I had got back over half of my AP disaster.

With all my bonuses now cleared except AP, I bit the bullet and went back. Obviously I was off the hit list and at one point I had won back the whole of my previous days winnings. Having done so I then didn't hit another hand for 2 hours, but this time it didn't cost me as much because I had crap cards.

The odd thing I find about Absolute is I am either winning or losing. Unlike other sites where I often have periods where I just go round in circles, at AP I am always on a streak.

I wish I understood probability theory a bit better. Sometimes I find my poor mathematics telling me that the odds on something happening are millions to one, when I suspect they aren't nearly that high. For example, playing heads up, I lost 5 consecutive hands, all on the river. One of these was to a flush draw (9 outs), but all the others were 3 outs or lower. My dubious maths makes that around 521,000 to one.

Anyway, after my moaning and shouting, despite the variance I am still moving in the right direction and with a bit of luck the rest of the month will bring some more sedate progress.

Ashbash

What a Great Superbowl

2005-02-07T09:47:00.000Z

Being this side of the pond, the Superbowl always presents a bit of a problem for me. Do I stay up and watch until 3 in the morning, getting into work late and bleary eyed, or do I go to bed normal time, video it and watch on fast forward in the morning.

This year, as a Pats fan and in view of the fact that the game looked like it should be a close one, I decided to stay up and watch, at the same time as trying to clear some of the Superbowl bonuses that the poker sites have been kind enough to throw our way. :-)

What a great decision!!!

After two days going absolutely nowhere on Paradise, I made $240 profit during the game, plus some more bonus. And the Pats won a exciting, if hardly classical, game.

I'm not sure whether people were distracted by the game, or drunk, or what but some of the poker play last night was really really poor. It wasn't how many cards I caught, it was how much I made when I caught them.

Poker is all about decision making - last night I clearly made a good decision!! :-)

February has started like each of my last four months, with a big rush of profit. One week in and I'm up over $800, and I've still got $300 of pending bonuses to clear. Now if I can just avoid hitting a wall around the 20th this could be a good month.

January Ends!

2005-02-03T13:13:00.000Z

All in all January ended up being a bit of a disappointment. Which is strange seeing as I made my biggest monthly profit ever.

It all came down to the fact that I made nearly all my money in the first two weeks of the month. $1500 by mid Jan. So my eventual haul of just over $1700 wasn't quite as positive as it should have been.

My experiment proved to be a success. If you play $1/$2 multitable and just hunt down bonuses, you can easily make $1k every month even as a recreational player. The lack of hours is offset by the intensity of the session, if you play 3 tables at once. Some months you will make much more if you have a solid game and a few cards come your way.

What I didn't expect was that the process actually becomes boring very quickly. I was playing a game I knew I could beat, at less than 100%. The enjoyment and excitement factor wears of quite quickly and gets replaced with frustration during any significant period of cold cards or bad beats.

So I think I will move on. I still take the bonuses but I suspect I will move back to higher limits and cut down on the number of tables I play whenever I don't have a pending bonus.

Mind you, with it being Superbowl weekend, I suspect every major site will run a promotion and this month I probably won't ever run out of pending bonuses to clear.

Good Luck at the Tables

Ashbash

Life as a poker coward

2005-01-24T09:41:00.000Z

After another good weekend at $1/$2, I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm a poker coward.

I now have a bankroll big enough for $5/$10, and I am regularly running over the $1/$2 games, but I still find it difficult to force myself to move up the limits. It seems crazy considering in the odd moment of tilt, I've loaded up in a $15/$30 game, but there it is.

Part of that seems to be the fact that I am making more and more money each month without moving up. And also, my preferred hunting ground, Absolute, often has a lack of games at $2/$4. But if I'm honest, I suspect it is the fear of losing sessions that holds me back.

When I'm not playing I accept that losing sessions are a part of the game. I understand the concept of variation and the mechanics behind it. But when I'm back in front of my computer playing, losing sessions still frustrate me and make me doubt my own abilities.

I'm considering forcing myself to play the whole of February at $2/$4.

Absolute Addict

2005-01-17T09:32:00.000Z

Well, I well and truly jinxed myself on that one.

Only a few hands in I get rockets. Reasonble pre-flop raise with 2 callers. Rag flop. I push in all in and DJK has a set of 8's! Oops.

Slightly worrying trend on AP at the moment. I've gone out my last 5 tournaments with AA, without ever getting going. 2 of them were first hand, and 4 out of those 5 were to lower Pocket Pairs who pushed all in (they did it not me).

Anyway, enough of the negative stuff. My New Years Resolution was to be more positive.

The weekend was good all round. I won consistently and my heads up game clicked in after a couple of months of problems. I think the constant bad beats on full tables had subconsciously rocked my confidence and affected my aggression heads up.

So, after a $500 weekend, all I can say is long may it continue!

I Think This Blog Has Bought Me Luck!!

2005-01-15T19:18:00.000Z

Well!! First day after starting a poker blog and so far I'm up around $300.

Playing mainly $1/$2 with a bit of $2/$4. Lots of heads up and shorthanded but I've done ok today on the full tables too.

It feels like two months of good luck all rolled up into one day.

Anyway, its the www.poker-strategy.org absolute addict tournament later so hopefully my luck will until then!!

Introduction

2005-01-14T14:01:00.000Z

Hi

I'm a 34 year old lawyer living in the UK. I've been playing online poker for about 2 years now, having had no previous poker experience.

You might want to check out www.poker-strategy.org to see some articles I've written and generally to have a look around the friendly and informative forums. Its a flame-free zone I promise.

Anyway, last year I switched from no limit ring games and mainly SNG's, to playing limit poker. After working my way up through the micros, I've got a bankroll that can happily stand $5/$10 although I normally play around the $2/$4 level.

This year I'm planning on learning 7CS and taking my monthly winnings to a minimum of $1k per month. This would also keep me in line with Coach's (from PSORG) target of taking his total winnings over $20k.

In the meantime, hopefully I'll be able to develop my poker and writing skills during the course of the year.

Take Care All

Ashbash